Why the Obama Haters Are Choking on Their Own Sins

Vaya con dios, sanity: Beyond the shouting from Joe Wilson and 9/12 protestors in Washington, the undercurrent of American rage seems increasingly founded in backward logic. Esquire.com's political columnist breaks down the ambivalent madness of (former) king GOP.

Last week, around the same time President Obama was giving his health-care speech to Congress, I was in Washington to interview some administration officials for an upcoming story in Esquire. They were so damn positive. And hardworking. And energetic — the kinds of people who actually wake up at dawn to go running just so they can get to the office by 7:30, who eat salads and read only useful books. They don't watch television. They never drink more than a glass or two of wine. Sometimes they might indulge in a social beer, but it really is a social beer.

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No wonder they're dumfounded by all the tea baggers who stormed the hill on Saturday. Obama's geeks can't seem to understand people who don't want to share their toys, who don't use birth control because they know sex is dirty, who would rather do the wrong thing than do what is good for them.

And here were the Obamanauts thinking they had finessed this problem of American rage — because, you know, they really don't want to force anybody to do things. They believe in this idea of "libertarian paternalism," which means they'll put the fruits and veggies right there at eye level by the counter and put the chips and sugary sodas way up on the top shelf. They're not going to force you to pick the public option, as the Republicans keep prodding with that new American apocalypse of command government — they're going to use "choice architecture" to "nudge" you toward what is obviously good for you.

What these nice, intelligent people working for the president don't understand is the imp of the perverse.

As a man wise in the ways of human madness once told me, "You think it's money with the Republicans and sex with the Democrats, but really it's the other way around." That's why folks in the Bible Belt buy more porn than anybody else, and why their pregnancy and abortion rates are the highest in the nation. Because it is always the Other that we desire. Crazy two-legged beasts that we are, teetering in this awkward upright posture, we define our civilization by carving sins out of the category of acceptable human behavior — and then immediately begin committing them with the most feverish enthusiasm.

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It's no accident that much of this impulse comes from the southern states, which recent polls suggest are virtually united in their opposition to President Obama. After all, this is the region that fought government intrusion upon its freedoms by forming its own government to intrude upon its freedoms, that imposed the Fugitive Slave Law on other states in the name of states' rights, that fought for slavery in the name of liberty. None of this was particularly logical, but then again, logic is just another iron law of compulsion.

This is how Edmund Wilson put it in Patriotic Gore, his classic study of the literature of the Confederacy:

"The passion for independence which with masters of a subject race so often takes the form of wrong-headedness, of self-assertion for its own sake, of tantrums, this self-will that has made an issue, and is now making a cult, of states' rights, is now provoking certain elements to rebel against the Confederacy itself... The great irony is that the recalcitrance of the Southerners against any sort of central control, which has led them to secede from the Union, is also — since they refuse to submit to the kind of governmental coercion that will enable the North to win — obstructing their success in the war."

Put another way: There is freedom and glory in the giddy joys of rebellion, but the consequences can be ugly.

Consider what Frederick Law Olmstead found on his tour of the South just before the war:

"The traveler finds that one family he visits is putting through a road in a certain direction in order to establish communication with neighbors whom they happen to like, but doing nothing in the other direction, because they do not like the people who live there. He is astonished at the lack of 'improvements' of the kind that are always being made in the North, and he eventually becomes appalled at the deficiency of the South in that "culture" which means so much to New England. There are few newspapers, and few people read them. Almost no books are published. The press is under virtual censorship, since no discussion of slavery is possible. The people rarely talk about anything except narrowly local matters... [There are] neither sports nor debating societies, military companies nor libraries, theaters nor concert halls, singing societies nor amateur theatricals. There are no civic bodies to sit on, no school boards or church corporations, no benevolent or agricultural societies, no bridge or water companies..."

In that spirit, allow me to review:

If Republicans had gotten everything they wanted for the last seventy-five years or so, the United States of America would have no Social Security, no Medicare, no Aid to Dependent Children, no civil rights, no environmental protections, no privacy rights to make contraception legal. There would be no business taxes, either, which could mean an even more vigorous business sector but also lots of gated communities and private security guards and — who knows? — maybe death squads to put down the inevitable insurrections. And there would certainly be no "death taxes," so we'd be burdened with an ever larger cohort of inbred aristocrats. And our daughters and sisters would be flocking to the nation's emergency rooms, hemorrhaging from illegal abortions. And we might still be at war in Vietnam.

On the other hand, consider what the Republicans gave Americans during their last eight years in power: They were asleep at the switch when Osama bin Laden attacked, overreacted by invading a country that had not attacked us (at the cost of about $1 trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives), saddled the country with $43 billion a year in unfunded Medicare mandates and another $1.7 trillion in unfunded tax cuts for the rich ($2.5 trillion according to a new study by Citizens for Tax Justice [PDF]) — then followed their market fundamentalist ideology right over the economic cliff and sent the whole planet spinning into recession.

And now they're upset about how Obama is running the country? What gives them the right to criticize, exactly?

Thoughts on partisan rage? Reflections on the anniversary of the financial collapse? Love letters? Click here to e-mail John H. Richardson about his weekly political column at Esquire.com.